The Sleeping Sands Read Online Free PDF

and infinite variations of blues and purples vied with each other in the impossibly intertwined and contorted body of the earth.
    It was, thought Layard, a savage desolation – a riot of the most varied and fantastic shapes as far as the eye could see – caught in the middle of some violent and cataclysmic act, as if the waves of a storm-tossed ocean had been suddenly frozen at their most extreme point of chaos. Each pinnacle and peak appeared so unique and so striking as to have been the result of some conscious and omnipotent hand. At the same time each appeared to be so utterly tortured and desperate that to imagine the mind behind that hand was terrifying beyond comprehension. Pausing at the summit of a high pass and gazing out on the immense and fearsome hills that surrounded him, Layard fancied that he had never been closer, nor more absolutely remote from the terrible intelligence of creation.
    To the north, a faint line of gold in the dying light marked the distant Dead Sea. Below, surrounded by the inhospitable expanse of the Wadi Ghor were the gateway to the Valley of Moses and the trail to Petra. Layard turned from his meditation to the two Arab tribesmen that the colonel had procured him and told them to begin preparing a camp.
    ‘It is not safe, Effendi, we must move down into the Wadi. There are too many robbers in these hills.’
    Layard sighed. The ascent had been hard and thirsty work and he was convinced that the hills held rock tombs that bore investigation. Still his guides, Awad and Musa were local tribesmen who knew the land well and they had already encountered one armed band of Bedouins who had shown more than casual interest in their business. Reluctantly, he nodded assent.
    ‘Very well. We will move on but I want to make camp before the night falls.’
    Awad gestured to a distant rocky crag that protruded above the trail at the foot of the hills. ‘There, Effendi. We can make a safe camp there.’
    Layard turned back to the camels, which they had hired in Hebron to replace their exhausted mules. Wrinkling his nose at their pungent and now unwelcomely familiar smell, he helped Antonio to check and resecure their precious equipment. His mental listing of the apparatus was now almost automatic – as much a part of the routines and reflexes of daily life as eating or breathing. Everything was present, secure and whole. Reassured that his last remnant of connection with civilisation and the distant memory of London remained intact, he began the slow descent into the great valley below. As his aching muscles protested against the constant jarring of feet sliding on loose rubble or knees and ankles turned by hidden fissures, Layard felt a nostalgia for the town of Hebron. Among this desolation, he began to fancy Hebron’s few scrubby fruit trees and vineyards a sylvan paradise and its stinking, tumbledown streets a metropolis.
    A crackle of thunder echoed across the hilltops. Musa, the second guide, turned to survey the sky.
    ‘Effendi. We must hurry if we want to pitch camp before dark.’
    Layard scanned the jagged horizon of the peaks. There were no clouds to be seen.
     
    In Hebron, Colonel Yusuf was sitting in the evening shade, enjoying a water pipe. Beside him sat a European. This Frank was shorter of stature than Layard and a number of years older, yet had, fancied the colonel, a similar bearing and aura of relentless determination. In the older man, perhaps, he sensed less recklessness; or else age had tempered it with the circumspection of a diplomat. From the morning’s evidence, the man certainly had greater stomach for the more visceral aspects of the Colonel’s work than had Layard – or else he was better at disguising his distaste. The two tall Lur tribesmen who kept a constant, silent vigil at the man’s shoulder had certainly appeared to show no misgivings about the Colonel’s methods and, he had carefully observed, watched all of the proceedings with the air of approving